1. Initial Concept. As I have discussed, the
initial concept of our game changed relatively little
over the course of development. Something about "an
action horror game set in a prison" was uniquely
compelling to our publisher, the press, and gamers
alike. Despite containing highly stylized supernatural
creatures, the game's very real-world setting was
essential to making the game relevant and hooking
people. The game's prison setting proved particularly
intriguing to gamers and was a rich space for us to
explore that had been under-utilized previously.

Shortly after development started, I wrote a fairly
detailed back-story for both the game world (Carnate
Island) and Torque, and these elements also changed
relatively little over the course of development.
Though we did not plan on communicating all of this
back-story to the player directly, it gave the game
tremendous consistency as we built it. As we were
given more time to iterate on the project, the back-story
documents gave us a strong foundation on which to
expand the game without seeming forced.

2. Focus. Having established our high-level
design goals from the start, we were then extremely
frugal about adding features. We knew that in order
to properly implement the features the game did need,
we would have to omit mechanics that were non-essential.
For example, beyond his weapons, health, and flashlight
batteries, Torque cannot carry any inventory items,
including keys. To some, it was odd that we were making
a prison game that didn't include using keys to unlock
cells and gates. But in the end we realized that including
keys didn't really add much if anything to the core
gameplay experience and would have been wasted development
time.

Evolution
of the Slayer.

At the same time, we worked hard to keep the features
that enhanced our core gameplay. Our fully playable
first person mode evolved out of a more traditional
"look around" mode. Over the course of development
numerous problems arose and cutting it was suggested
numerous times. This feature, however, was a major
enhancement to our core gameplay experience, since
shooting from the first person perspective is extremely
intuitive to players. Indeed, from our gameplay testing
we knew this was a very popular feature. Thus we knew
that whatever extra time was required to make a fully
functional first person mode would be well worth it.

Though we may have been too conservative in a few cases
(for example, the game's shooter mechanics would be
better off had we included the ability for Torque
to crouch), overall our strict policy paid off nicely
and allowed us to refine our core features while staying
on schedule.

3. Changing the Control Scheme. Though I said earlier that
we stayed remarkably close to our original concept, there is something
that changed significantly from our earliest one-liner: the game
stopped being similar to Devil May Cry (DMC). Indeed,
from the very beginning I wasn't much of a fan of the gameplay in
DMC and preferred shooters that, at that time, were traditionally
more popular on the PC. Indeed, Half-Life was also mentioned
in our concept for exactly that reason. Truth be told, DMC was
mentioned in the pitch because a number of the publishers we were
talking with about The Suffering had expressed interest in
appealing to the fans of DMC.

As a result, from the start our game and level design
work had much more in common with Half-Life
than with DMC, except for our controls. When
designing control schemes, I feel that you want to
give the user something they are familiar with from
other games. In general I find relying on other games
for inspiration to be problematic, but in the case
of controls I think it is crucial. What we had originally
implemented was a target-lock system inspired by Syphon
Filter, the most popular third-person shooter
on the PlayStation, and DMC, at the time the
most popular third-person shooter on the PlayStation
2. With our controls for a console-style shooter but
our gameplay from a PC-style shooter, about a year
into development we realized we had a dangerous disconnect
in our design that made our game tedious instead of
fun.

However, by this point Max Payne, Halo,
Medal of Honor: Frontline, and SOCOM had
all been released on the consoles and sold in excess
of a million copies each. All were shooting based
games in the PC tradition: they eschewed target-lock
in favor of double-stick control schemes that simulated
the mouse/keyboard experience from the PC. This system
had the advantage of forcing players to actually aim
at their target while having the disadvantage of being
challenging for novice players to pick up. But looking
at the sales for these titles, we concluded the installed
base of players who were familiar with these controls
was now large enough that we could take the risk of
turning off a few newbies.

The change was a huge success for the game: it fixed
the disconnect in our gameplay and added depth that
had been completely missing. There was now very little
similarity to DMC to be found. Looking at the
forums today, I find that some players still have
trouble adjusting to the two-stick system, and I believe
we have lost some potential players for this reason.
However, our significantly deeper game experience
has brought in so many players that I know we made
the right decision.

Two
2D level maps created by the design team
prior to level construction. The one on
the left was created using Smart Draw,
while the one on the bottom was made using
Photoshop.

4. Storytelling Techniques.The Suffering
had a deep story to convey, but we didn't want storytelling
to get in the way of our core game experience. With
immersion being one of our design goals, we didn't
want to rely on too many cut-scenes. We had a rule
of thumb that cut-scenes were to be used exclusively
for pivotal story points or for intensely scary scenes.
Furthermore, we wanted to keep Torque's actions fairly
neutral during these scenes to avoid negating the
player's feeling that they were fully in control of
Torque at all times. Thus we needed to use different
storytelling techniques.

A lot of story was communicated during gameplay through
the various NPCs who function as Torque's guides through
the world of Carnate Island. Though the player could
kill any human character at any time (thus missing
out on the story points they had to convey) being
in a horror space allowed us to use supernatural characters
who Torque was unable to kill. The player could also
hear dialog over radios, PA systems, and telephones,
all real-time during gameplay. The player was also
able to collect various notes throughout the game
in addition to unlocking pages in an archive, both
of which revealed more of the back-story to players
who were interested. Finally, we used a slow-motion
blur effect to convey events from Torque's past and
the history of the island. Inspired by some of the
imagery from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining,
this technique was our most innovative and also proved
to be fairly frightening.

All of these techniques combined to allow us to tell
a story with a minimum of play interruption. Players
who wanted to experience the story were able to, while
those who would rather stick to playing the game could
ignore it. Even with these techniques, the story is
kept mysterious enough that players will still be
left with numerous unanswered questions. My hope is
that players will fill in the blanks with their own
imagination, following the tradition of great horror
films such as The Birds, The Shining,
The Blair Witch Project, and The Ring.
In horror, the player's imagination is far more disturbing
than anything a writer could possibly come up with.

5. Iteration and Gameplay Testing. From a design
standpoint, one of the most fortunate events of The
Suffering's development was getting time to iterate
on the game. Midway was quite happy with the game's
progress and had seen a strong reaction to it from
the press and public alike. Thus they gave us a generous
time extension, not because we were behind schedule
but because they wanted to make the game as strong
as possible. Thus, with our levels all fully built
and functional many months before shipping, we were
able to do a number of passes on the game. We did
a pass on horror elements to make the game more frightening,
including adding our real-time environmental flashes
that are so key to the final experience. We also did
a story pass, not to change the story but to expand
on how it was presented to the player. We performed
an AI pass to make the creatures much more dynamic
and varied in their behaviors. Finally we did a puzzle
pass to fix the most egregious problems with the puzzles.
The impact of these passes cannot be underestimated.
For example, the game's design did not originally
plan for the real-time scenes involving Torque's wife
and children to be in the game, since we did not have
time to build them from an art standpoint. Anyone
who has played The Suffering knows how crucial
those scenes are to the game experience.

To help us figure out what needed fixing, at numerous
points in development we put the game in front of
a group of gamers and watched them play and then listened
to their feedback. This gameplay testing is distinct
from focus testing since these sessions were for development
feedback alone, not for marketing use at all. We did
this as early as seven months into development, and
we were able to fix a lot of major problems early
on, including our disjointed control scheme. If anything,
the game could have benefited from more gameplay testing,
but what we did have time for impacted the game tremendously.